Both front and back audio jacks are not working

[maxbamfield]

I recently built a new pc, for a week the front audio jacks worked fine, then they stopped working. The back audio jacks don,t work as well. I have tried installing and updating loads of audio drivers but nothing has happened. When i plug things in there is no notification of it being plugged in and it doesn,t come up on the audio device manager. Sound only comes out of my monitor. Can anyone help?

 

[Paperdoc]

Yup. To start, you need to know two things. Your mobo has an audio chip that you were using, but does not appear to work any more. However, you are getting sound on your monitor. It is very difficult to get audio from a mobo chip over to a video card so it can go out to your monitor on the HDMI cable. And I'm betting that is how your monitor is connected. To solve that, almost all video card makers put their own audio chip on the video card, and send output from THAT chip to the monitor on the HDMI cable. Now, the tricky part is that Windows has a limit that affects this. Windows can only use ONE audio output device to send out sound at a time, no matter how many devices you have in your system. You get to tell Windows which Default Sound Playback Device to use in a configuration tab you can access through Control Panel ... Sounds and Audio Devices. You can set any of your devices to be used there, but that means that NO sound will be sent out from other devices until you come back and change your setting.

It is VERY common when you install a video card and run its device driver installation utility that the system will install BOTH the video and audio device drivers for those two systems on your video card, and then will set the Windows option for you to play sounds via the video card's audio chip and the HDMI cable to the monitor. That means that there will be NO sound signals coming out of your mobo's back panel sound jacks OR from the front panel jacks that also are connected to the mobo audio chip.

If you want to play sounds the way the were before - say, though a speaker system connected to the back panel and some headphones on the front jacks, like the way my system does it - go into the configuration tab and change the Defaults Sound Playback device to the audio chip on your mobo (probably Realtek) instead of the one on the video card. This means that you will NOT get sound out of your monitor's speakers, unless you connect another way to feed signals from your mobo rear panel jacks to some inputs on the monitor.